QMumbai: Adivasi Protest March in City; Ruias Property Division

Hundreds of people, predominantly Adivasis, from all over Maharashtra converged in Mumbai on Tuesday morning to participate in a rally organised to highlight the travails of the Adivasi community. They also want to assert their rights.

Adivasis from Mumbai, Thane, Raigad, Nashik and Palghar marched in the sweltering heat of the city from Aarey colony to Thane halting at Mulund ultimately. They say that they will continue to hold their ground until their demands are met.

Thirty-five years after cotton king Ramnarain Ruia’s grandson Nirmal Kumar Ruia, who died in 2007, approached the Bombay High Court to facilitate the division of his ancestral mansion, Anand Bhavan, the city civil court, which took up the suit in 2012, has set the wheels in motion by appointing a commissioner to oversee the division.

Anand Bhavan is spread over 5,741 sq mt on Malabar Hill and is a Grade II heritage structure, hence cannot be demolished. It was Nirmal Kumar’s plea that it will not be possible to divide the mansion into equal proportions. He had proposed that the property be sold.

Four people were hospitalised and more than 75 shanties were gutted in a major fire that broke out at Lalmati slum in Bandra.

Four people were hospitalised and more than 75 shanties were gutted in a major fire that broke out at Lalmati slum, also known as Nargis Dutt Nagar slum, opposite Ali Yavar Jung National Institute of Speech and Hearing Disabilities in Bandra Reclamation on Tuesday. This is for the fifth time since 2004 that the slum has been engulfed in fire.

Prima facie, a cylinder blast appears to be the cause behind the blaze that was categorised as a level-four fire. In all, 12 cylinder burst, according to fire officials.

The Food and Drug Administration conducted raid on Monday night to prevent adulteration of milk in Andheriarea. They seized 544 litre milk worth Rs 28,566. The milk was destroyed on the spot.

The raids were conducted at two places in Andheri west for tampering of branded company milk. Narsaiah Chandrapur Todusu, a milk vendor at Jeevan Nagar, Rahiwasi Sangh, new link road Andheri (west) was caught red handed diluting milk with water. The milk from Gokul and Amulcompanies were tampered with. The total stock destroyed was of 224 litre worth Rs 12,029, assistant FDA officer Shailesh Adhav said.

Ruling out the possibility of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor Urjit Patel “quitting in a huff” after an unprecedented attack on the central bank’s functioning by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley yesterday, a top RBI official said the government’s biggest grouse against the RBI was its reluctance to lift the banking sector out of the cash crunch.

“The government obviously has set its goals for the 2019 general elections and it’s not helping that small and medium-scale businesses are getting affected due to cash crunch in the banking sector,” an RBI director, who didn’t want to be identified, told Mumbai Mirror.

After a marathon meeting with the Ola and Uber managements that went on for more than seven hours, leaders of the app-based cab drivers’ union indicated that the strike may be called off on Tuesday. A joint meeting with the transport commissioner has been scheduled for 3.30pm on Tuesday, after which a final decision will be announced.

Since October 22, the majority of app-based cab drivers have been on an indefinite strike. On Monday morning, approximately 500 protestors gathered outside Ola’s office in Chakala. After some attacked a few drivers who were not participating in the strike, the police intervened. This was followed by a meeting between the Ola and Uber managements, and the cab drivers’ union.

Over ten years after Malegaon blast killed six people and injured over 100, the trial court framed charges against right wing accused Pragya Singh Thakur, Lt Col Prasad Shrikant Purohit and five others for terror activities, criminal conspiracy and murder, among others.

Special judge Vinod Padalkar, presiding over the special National Investigation Agency (NIA) court, framed charges against all the seven accused under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), Explosive Substances Act and the Indian Penal Code (IPC). The case is now posted for hearing on November 2. Apart from Purohit and Thakur, the accused include Major (retired) Ramesh Upadhyay, Ajay Rahirkar, Sudhakar Dwivedi, Sudhakar Chaturvedi and Sameer Kulkarni.

Around 70 surgeries had to be postponed this month at the Gokuldas Tejpal (GT) Hospital in Fort due to acute water shortage. Apart from the operation theatres, the patients and their relatives have been complaining since the toilets in the hospital wards have had trace amounts of water in the past couple of weeks.

The hospital administration stated that though they have been experiencing shortage of water for several months now, the problem has been aggravated in the past two weeks. "Our requirement of water has increased since the number of patients have also gone up. We have approached the BMC and an extra line will be laid for the hospital in the next couple of days," said Mukund Tayde, medical superintendent of GT hospital.

You know you are in Mumbai when Google Maps says it would take longer to reach your destination by car than by walking, according to a recent tweet.

According to experts, an increase in the number of vehicles on Mumbai’s roads — from 20.28 lakh to 33.52 lakh in six years — is the main reason behind the city’s traffic troubles. Insufficient parking space, which has led to illegal parking on the roads, compounded these woes further, with seemingly no solutions by the city’s traffic department.

A diamond merchant, whose wife had registered a missing person's complaint at the Tardeo police station on October 7, was finally found in a hotel room near the Sai Baba temple in Shirdi, Nashik. The scanning of diamond merchant Rajesh Sadiwala's bank account transactions helped cops trace him.

A senior police officer told mid-day that his family had suspected Sadiwala had been kidnapped by his business rival. His sudden disappearance had also left the bullion market shocked. "We had been considering all possible angles while looking for him," the officer said. Four special teams of police officers were formed to investigate the case. "They were asked to check Call Data Records (CDR) of the diamond merchant and technical evidences like CCTV cameras," said an officer privy to the investigation.